Jenna Ellis (Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images)
Yesterday, Donald Trump’s former attorney Jenna Ellis agreed to a three-year suspension from the bar in her home state of Colorado. The MAGA mean girl had previously accepted censure for multiple public false statements about election fraud in 2020, but her later guilty plea in Georgia to feloniously abetting false statements and writings forced the state disciplinary counsel’s hand.
It’s been a long, strange trip for Ellis, whose legal career started off in the District Attorney’s Office in Weld County, Colorado, where she managed to get herself fired for incompetence as a traffic court prosecutor. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, she claimed to have been terminated “because she refused to bring a case to trial that she believed was an unethical prosecution.” But the Colorado Sun, which also broke the disbarment story, reported that Ellis was fired for “unsatisfactory performance” and failing to adhere to the Colorado Victim Rights Act.
Ellis was originally denied unemployment compensation, but went on to win on appeal because the examiner found that she was “performing the duties to the best of her ability” given the “deficiencies in her education and experience” and had “committed an irreparable egregious act” in just a few of her cases.
Being adjudicated too stupid to be fired for incompetence might cause anyone to shade their bio, but Ellis, a staunch Christian conservative, seems to have taken quite a liberal approach when it came to her own CV. A six-month gig with a discovery processing company which had a contract with the State Department was rechristened as time spent as an “attorney for the US Department of State.” After a stint as a pre-law advisor to undergrads at a Christian college she described herself as a “professor of constitutional law.” And by 2019, after on-air interviews with Trump’s de facto HR department at Fox News, she emerged as a “constitutional law attorney” for the Trump campaign.
Ellis famously announced herself as a founding member of the Elite Superfriends Sparklemagic Strike Team Task Force at that RNC presser in 2020 where Rudy Giuliani leaked hair dye and Sidney Powell brayed about dead Hugo Chávez stealing the election for Joe Biden. But Ellis never entered her appearance on an election case, and her duties appeared to be more aligned with her abilities. In short, she spent four months toddling along behind Giuliani, attempting to get state legislatures to steal electoral votes for Trump, while spewing nonsense on conservative media.
And while Ellis’s social media presence is heavy on Bible quotes and sanctimony, she’s basically just an asshole. In a since-deleted tweet, she accused Republican pollster Frank Luntz of having a “micro-penis.” When the artist Lizzo, a classically trained musician, played Thomas Jefferson’s flute at the Library of Congress, Ellis huffed about the “desecration” by someone whose main claim to fame is “being one the most morbidly obese people in the world.”
She’s also got a long history of anti-LGBTQ activism, and has called Islam “not American,” claiming that the religion “allows individuals to decide who and when and where to carry out capital punishment.”
And so it’s hardly surprising that Ellis’s letter to the Presiding Disciplinary Judge has the ring of a 14-year-old who is very sorry that she got caught.
“Lawyers by profession should first be truth seekers. We should zealously advocate for clients, but never at the expense of the truth or outside the bounds of the law,” she began, before moving on to congratulating herself for being so brave and honest and accepting responsibility when the choice was literally that or go to jail. “When facts or evidence comes to light that bears upon our own conduct, it is right for the honest lawyer to take accountability for our actions. That is what I am doing.”
She just got in with a bad crowd, okay? How was she to know that an upstanding guy like, uh, Rudy Giuliani, with whom she spent many months in close proximity, was leading her down the devil’s path.
In the beginning of my involvement I genuinely believed that the election challenges were made in good faith—basically a repeat of a Bush v. Gore situation, not an effort to undermine the public faith in the integrity of elections. But I admit that I was overly zealous in believing the “facts” being peddled to support the challenge, which were manufactured and false.
Had I done my duty in investigating these alleged facts before promoting them as the truth, I do not believe I would be here. I turned a blind eye to the possibility that senior lawyers for the Trump Campaign were embracing claims they knew or should have known were false. I just went along with it. I was wrong.
After her first censure, Ellis’s repentance was short-lived.
“I would NEVER lie,” she huffed on Twitter. “Lying requires INTENTIONALLY making a false statement. I never did that, nor did I stipulate to or admit that.”
But Ellis seems perfectly prepared to continue her career flogging lies about American elections. On her radio show last night, she urged Trump to “focus almost exclusively on the border issue!” because “Biden is importing a new electorate to replace Americans.” Undocumented immigrants cannot vote, and part of the reason that she’s been excluded from the practice of law is that she sat there nodding along when Rudy claimed that they had in the millions.
She also tacitly acknowledged that her real job isn’t “lawyer” at all and so the loss of her license to practice in Colorado — or anywhere else — won’t make any difference for her.
“She lives in Florida. Check mate,” wrote someone sporting the handle @RightWingDad in a post retweeted by Ellis.
And, PS, Jesus loves her, and not you.
This morning it was time God’s faithful servant to get back to spreading the Lord’s gospel. That’s right, our nation’s foremost Christian constitutional scholar is livetweeting trial commentary by Jonathan Turley.
And the people say, AMEN.
#Jenna #Ellis
